Tuesday, October 2, 2012

June 24 - day off, Brazilian sandpiper

Clouds late in the day combined with a fog bank just behind the tents made for some dramatic scenery

Today was my and Brad’s day off
again, a colder day that started off foggy but as I go to bed now you can see
the Brooks Range, nice cloud formations, and most of the surrounding world.

Per usual I spent most of the day
working on data in excel, fun per usual. Now that we have lots of nests you can
do some really cool stuff with the data, such as plotting the day that the nest
was initiated for all nests, which shows the distribution of when birds began
nesting. This year the distribution is strongly bimodal, with one mountain
peak, then a valley, and then another, small peak that echoes the first. This
shows the re-nests due to predation by the foxes, with the second peak being
the birds that got predated early enough to chance having a second nest.

Scott and I have been talking about
publishing the renest data, since it is a rarely described occurrence, and we
have seven renests found so far!

A beautiful afternoon, with the mountains lit up nicely in the distance

Slow birding day, watched Mr Brazil
a bit but no nest. I think he is chickless in more ways than one.

Current day note: The Brazilian
banded bird somehow got glossed over on June 11 when I was writing about camp –
since it was the first day I guess I didn’t know what to write about yet.

In any case, the single most
significant sighting of the season here thus far is of a Semipalmated Sandpiper
that was banded on the coast of Northeastern Brazil this winter, at the end of
January. He sports a blue flag with the letters KKL on it, and we have seen him
a few times now, always in the same area, but sadly invariably without a lady.

Note the blue flag instead of the normal green. If you look at the metal band very closely you can see the word "Brasil" engraved in the side